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SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 
OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 



SAMUEL H.FORRER 



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LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 




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Book 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSHi 



Some Cognitive Elements 
of Religious Experience 

By 

SAMUEL H. FORRER 




BOSTON: THE GORHAM PRESS 

TORONTO : THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED 



Copyright 1917 by Samuel H. Forrer 
All Rights Reserved 



SEP 26 1317 



4*1 



Made in the United States of America 



The Gorham PressVBoston, U.S.A. 

©GI.A478675 



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TO 
THE OFFICERS AND MEMBERS OF 
PARK CHURCH, ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA 

whose wise consideration affords their pastor 

ample time for work in the il study 1 \ bat 

deprives him of all excuse for 

inadequate pulpit preparation, 

this book is affectionately 

dedicated. 



PREFACE 

In the preparation of this thesis I have received 
assistance from Pres. Ormond's "Lectures on an 
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion", and his 
"Basal Concepts of Philosophy", Dr. John Watson's 
"Interpretation of Religious Experience", the late 
Prof. James' "Varieties of Religious Experience", 
Prof. Royce's "Problem of Christianity", and his 
"Sources of Religious Insight", Dinsmore's "Atone- 
ment in Literature and Life", Fairbairn's "Phil- 
osophy of the Christian Religion", the late Princi- 
pal Caird's "Evolution of Religion", the late Prof. 
Bowne's "Theism", and Prof. Hocking's "Meaning 
of God in Human Experience". 

Samuel H. Forrer, 
Erie, Pennsylvania. 



SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS OF 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 



SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS OF 
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 

BY "experience" we mean whatever is real or sig- 
nificant to human consciousness. Experience 
is distinguished as religious by its object. The ob- 
ject of religious experience is some super-human 
power apprehended as Divine. Religious experi- 
ence is, therefore, some sort of conscious response of 
the spirit of man to such a divine object. 

Hence religion developes with experience. It 
grows, evolves, attains. In the course of its evolu- 
tion the nature of man's response to the Divine is 
so varied as to sweep the whole gamut of the mind's 
possibilities from the terror of the lowest superstition 
to the concrete satisfaction of the highest ration- 
ality. 

Religion, therefore, must be estimated not by 
its origin but by its successful completion. The 
science of astronomy must not be judged today by 
the conception of primitive astrology, nor chemistry 
by the childish operations of ancient alchemy. We 
cannot go back to the childhood of the race for our 
standards of truth. The true nature of the acorn 
is fully discernible only in the oak; so the essen- 
tial character and worth of religion is discernible 
not in its germinative principle but in its loftiest 
reaches. 



IO SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

In all religious experience certain cognitive 
elements are essential. These cognitive elements 
are concretely cognitive. The God consciousness is 
a demand of man's entire nature — intellectual, 
moral, emotional. It has the warrant of the entire 
soul. 

Many of these cognitive elements are of course 
only embryonic or merely implicit in the lower forms 
of religion. Yet in these earliest stages religion 
is a process which involves concrete cognition 
— at first, no doubt, a sort of unreflective con- 
sciousness which, in the course of its development, 
becomes reflective and therefore, more and more 
able to give a reason for its existence. 

All human knowledge is of necessity partial. 
Every truth runs backward and forward into infin- 
ity. Man has no organs adequate to the full com- 
prehension of such truth. "The margin of knowl- 
edge fades forever and forever as we move." 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the cranny ; — 

Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 

Little flower — but if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is. ,, 

Limited as we are by the conditions of our sensible 
experience we cannot completely comprehend the 
depths and riches of the divine Mind. "We know 
in part." 

But as Prof. Hocking says, "It is not a true 
account of knowledge to say that it proceeds 
(always) from the part to the whole. The progress 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 1 1 

of knowledge has rather more in common with the 
development of a germ cell than with the building 
of a brick wall — something of the whole present and 
active in that cell from the beginning. . . . We do not 
learn to see space little by little. The child's space 
is as great as the man's, namely, whole space. He 
who comes into the world at all comes at once into 
the presence of the whole world. I am introduced 
to a person not by piece-meal but all at once, with a 
positive impression and judgment contained in my 
idea; not denying that there is much to learn and cor- 
rect through long growing acquaintance. So of 
my introduction to reality: in its full infinity and 
wholeness it is now before me and has been so from 
my conscious beginning, the same from birth to death. 
..... What grows in knowledge is the understanding 

of all this, the internal complexity and detail 

What grows in knowledge is growth of connection, 
growth of treaty-making between ideas. " 

Such growth is incomplete. Hence our knowl- 
edge is incomplete. 

But human knowledge while partial in the sense 
of not embracing infinity is complete in the sense of 
embracing reality to the fullness of its finite grasp. 
An old German proverb says, "It is provided that 
the trees shall not grow into the sky". To which 
Prof. Caird adds, "It is equally provided that they 
shall always grow towards it." It is a fundamental 
presupposition of all knowledge that the universe is 
intelligible and all intelligences are identical in their 
essential nature. 



12 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

Reality is not mere being, which is mere nothing 
— reached by a complete abstraction from all par- 
ticulars. Reality is the perfect unity which dif- 
ferentiates itself through particulars in various de- 
grees of self-manifestation. Hence to know is to 
include the particular under the universal and this 
universalized particular under a higher universal 
until the highest universal is reached through which 
all things ultimately must be known. 

Thus we have various stages of knowledge, 
but each in its own way embracing reality. The 
common sense stage of knowledge embraces isolated 
particulars under the universals of space and time. 
The scientific stage discovers that there are no iso- 
lated particulars in the universe, but certain inviol- 
able laws are the identities that bind all particulars 
into various unified spheres of knowledge. The 
religious stage, finally, rising to the highest universal, 
"sees all things in God" as the unity manifest in 
nature and human nature. Thus to know the 
natural law of the external world or the moral law 
of the self is to that extent to know the one Infinite 
Reality which is manifest at different levels in both. 

Perhaps no student of Shakespeare to-day 
grasps the entire range of his master's mind; yet to 
the extent that he does grasp it, to that extent he 
knows Shakespeare. So everything we can learn of 
the finite is a step in the knowledge of the infinite. 
The mind of man does not mistake cave shadows for 
fundamental actualities; it grasps reality with in- 
creasing capacity and certitude. 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 13 

There is a certain analogy between the life of 
the individual and that of the race. The former 
is a sort of an epitome of the history of the latter. 
But in the individual that history is so abbreviated 
that its various stages of development are confused. 
The religious experience of the race is the exper- 
ience of the individual writ large, and as Plato 
observed, it is by reading the large letters that we 
learn to interpret the small. Thus we are led to 
consider some cognitive elements in the development 
of the religious experience of the race, in the hope 
that such an examination of the macrocosm will serve 
to clarify our misunderstanding of the microcosm. 

What then are the cognitive elements in the re- 
ligious experience of the race which may be con- 
sidered fundamentals? 



I 

THE first and most fundamental is the conscious 
presence of some super-human object. 

All religion presupposes a psychical subject, 
a supersensible object, and a point of linkage between 
the two. This is religion at its irreducible minimum. 
This is the common element essential to the very 
nature of religion. The central problem of moral- 
ity is man's agency. The central problem of reli- 
gion is man's consiousness of God. 

The savage with his taboo, totem or fetich, 
recognizes the supersensible. His world is full of 
ghosts and gods. His rabbit's foot or bead or stick 
or stone has its hidden deity. From lowest savag- 
ery to highest civilization man's life moves under the 
influence of ideas that root in a recognized spiritual 
realm above him. 

"There are powers, we think, beyond seeing 
and hearing, on whom we depend, to whom we owe 
various duties, and who take note of our life and con- 
duct; and our relation to these powers is the deepest 
and highest and most solemn element in our exis- 
tence." Bowne. 

Herodotus said that in his travels he had found 
cities without walls, without schools, without temples 
of justice, but never a city without an altar of 
worship. 

Hence Prof. James, after a careful scientific 
investigation of the "Varieties of Religious Exper- 

14 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 1 5 

ience", concludes that man everywhere has discov- 
ered that he lives in the presence of the Divine. 

There are certain supposed exceptions among 
the religions of the earth to this reign of the reli- 
gious consciousness, viz : f etichism, which is regarded 
as pure idolatry; Buddhism, Humanism, Naturalism, 
which are denominated atheistic; and Confucianism, 
which is called a mere system of ethics. 

In refutation, however, of these suggested ex- 
ceptions, it need only be observed, as to the first 
exception, that the fetich is not a mere stick or stone, 
but a symbol of a supersensible presence related to 
the savage either for good or evil. 

Of course the immaturity of the savage state 
renders a clear idea of the nature of that super- 
natural Presence impossible. The savage may con- 
ceive his god as the magic w T hich dwells in a rabbit's 
foot, or as the mysterous power which resides in 
some beast — cat or bull; or in some person — medi- 
cine-man or wizard; but however he conceives the 
supernatural, it is as real a deity to him as was Jeho- 
vah to Israel. 

Buddhism was originally based on atheism. 
But the atheism was the recoil of the soul of man 
from a God regarded as purely objective to the op- 
posite extreme wherein He was regarded as purely 
subjective. Such extreme movements of the pendu- 
lum of faith mark the progress of human thought 
from stage to stage. Thus the different religions 
emphasize different factors of religious experience 
at different periods of its development. But though 
Buddhism swung from a purely objective God to the 



1 6 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 5 

recognition of no God at all, yet this situation was 
of temporary endurance. The religious conscious- 
ness soon asserted its rights and the Buddha was 
idealized and deified to occupy a position in Bud- 
dhism similar to that occupied by the Christ in 
Christianity. Thus he becomes the supersensible 
presence in the Buddhistic consciousness. 

Confucianism was originally a pure system of 
morality based on human relations. As such it was 
not a religion at all. But this system of mere ethics 
soon became the religion of China. How was this 
elevation attained? The central object of the Con- 
fucian ethics was the family ancestor. When the 
Chinese mind discovered the inadequacy of a system 
of morality which separated man from the divine 
presence and help, it proceeded to deify the family 
ancestor. Thus Confucianism became a religion of 
ancestor worship. 

From the days of Democritus Naturalism has 
attempted to explain the order of the universe by 
efficient causation. It eliminates the supernatural. 
But Naturalism remains powerless to evoke religious 
emotion until it deifies its world. Thus it substi- 
tutes the universe for God. 

Auguste Comte founded a school of thought 
based on "positive" scientific knowledge of facts. 
It was to supplant theology and metaphysics. The 
supersensible was to be eliminated. "Comte led 
God to the confines of the universe and bowed Him 
out." Comtek religion was to be a pure "Human- 
ism;" but his deeper nature rebelled, and before his 
death he had established a church of his own with 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 1 7 

its calendar of saints, its sacred days, its catechism, 
its Sabbath and its God. Humanity was deified and 
worshipped under the symbol of Comte's wife. 

Thus in the hour of revolt individual men 
may break with religion and deny the divine Pre- 
sence. But such revolt is merely the "Soul's tem- 
porary aberration from the normal of its true orbit". 
The religious consciousness will reassert its rights 
and man will recognize God or find some substitute 
to do business in His stead. 

What is the origin of man's faith in the super- 
natural? How is the divine object linked to the 
psychical subject? In other words, what is the 
origin of religion? 

Superficial students, hostilely inclined toward 
religion, have regarded it as an imposition upon 
human credulity by the art and device of king or 
priest. But until human ingenuity can contrive some 
process whereby to insert the persistent love and 
practice of art into an inartistic temparament, or to 
instill rationality into an irrational creature the the- 
ory of an external imposition of religion upon an 
irreligious being remains unworthy of serious con- 
sideration. 

The origin of religion is not external but in- 
ternal to the mind itself. A mind without consti- 
tutional need or tendency has no point of contact 
with anything without. Nothing can be imported 
into the mind from without. The source of religion 
must, therefore, be sought within the mind. 

Many internal origins of religion have been 
suggested, such as the fear of timid and helpless 



1 8 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

souls, the dreams of hungry or gorged savages, the 
hallucinations of diseased minds, the weird tricks 
of magic and sorcery, and so on ad infinitum. From 
such sources the world is peopled with mysterious 
presences — projections of the mind's own states of 
consciousness. 

The objection to all such suggested origins of 
religion is that they confuse the religious conscious- 
ness with its historical expressions. They lay the 
axe not at the root but at the fruit of the tree. 

To sketch certain characteristic features of 
religion at the time of its earliest historic expression 
is very different from a study of religion as a living 
thing, growing in its native soil, influenced by all the 
forces that play upon it and manifesting character- 
istic features at the various stages of development. 

The source of religion is deeper than the earli- 
est expression of religion. Man is fundamentally 
religious. He did not wander into the religious 
realm but grew into it and it grew in him and with 
him. He is a creature of the most high God and 
in his primary consciousness the creature meets and 
greets the Creator. The human spirit in its awak- 
ing consciousness salutes the Divine. 

Hence man is as truly a religious animal as he 
is a rational animal. He does not get reason from 
without; he is constitutionally rational. But he can 
no more choose to be religious than he can choose 
to be rational; he is both by the same necessity of 
nature. 

By the very constitution of his mind man lives 
at once in three worlds ; the world without, the world 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 1 9 

within, and the world above. His linkage to the 
world without we may call, in the language of Hegel, 
his sensuous consciousness; to the world within his 
self consciousness; to the world above, his religious 
consciousness. These three are one fundamentally 
and in the normal life develope together — a sort of 
trinity in unity. They are all necessarily present 
even though only implicit, in the earliest or lowest 
forms of human consciousness. 

A being whose nature is exhausted in sense 
objects can never transcend them. The stone or shell 
to him must be a stone or shell, never a fetich. 
Without the religious instinct man could no more 
rise above the sense object to the religious object 
than can the dog or the horse. Hence we say it 
is not something without but the primary conscious- 
ness within the man and behind his creed and ritual 
to which the origin of religion must be ascribed. 
The religious consciousness links man to the divine 
Being who is the source of all existence and knowl- 
edge and in whom all finite subjects and finite objects 
"live and move and have their being". 

We have no organ by which to know the ex- 
istence of other spiritual realities. How then do 
we know that other beings with minds like our own 
exist? The reality of our social world is the last 
thing we should doubt. There is nothing more cer- 
tain to us than the existence of other spirits like 
ourselves; yet we have no organ of knowledge by 
which to determine such existence. "In the nature 
of the case," says Prof. Hocking, "It could hardly 
be otherwise; the other mind must be beyond my 



20 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

powers of direct experience. It can be no object 
of sensation; because it is not a physical thing. It 
must be such as I am, a thinker of its objects, not an 
object among objects; and as such thinker, or subject, 
it can only be thought not sensed". 

We cannot see or handle existence but must 
feel it by some general sense which has no organ. 
Thus the ultimate test of reality becomes what the 
psychologists call the "reality feeling". It is an im- 
mediate contact and insight. 

Such is the inarticulate character of all our deep- 
est sources of religious knowledge. Down in the 
depths of the soul whence rises the primary con- 
sciousness of self, spring simultaneously the social 
consciousness and the religious. Thus man is born a 
potentially social and religious being quite as cer- 
tainly as a potentially self-conscious being. 

Man's religious instinct may embody itself in 
grotesque and gruesome forms. He may "worship 
and serve the creature rather than the Creator." 
He may obscure by sin the divine image upon his 
soul. But he cannot take even the wings of the 
morning and fly away from his religious intuition. 
It is as utterly impossible for one to rid himself of 
his religious consciousness as it would be to rid 
himself of his social or his self-consciousness and 
yet remain normal. Atheism in the form of 
eliminating from human consciousness the sense of 
the transcendent is a mental impossibility. Athe- 
ism is possible only as a protest against some accept- 
ed conception of the Divine in favor of what the 
atheist feels to be a more satisfying conception. 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 21 

However the religious consciousness survives as long 
as the normal mind survives. 

"There is no unbelief; 
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 
He trusts in God. 

"Whoever says, 'The clouds are in the sky, 
Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by,' 
Trusts the Most High. 

"Whoever sees, 'neath winters wealth of snow 
The silent harvest of the future grow, 
God's power must know. 

"Whoever says, 'Tomorrow, the Unknown, 
The Future, trusts the power alone 
He dares disown." 

Thus man clings to the existence of other spiritual 
beings like himself and to the existence of the divine 
Being not because he can prove such existence by 
logical processes, but even if he cannot prove it. 
Religion does not rest on proof, but underlies and 
antedates all rational attempts at proof. 

A being without the religious instinct could 
never be made religious by any multiplicity of ra- 
tional proofs of the existence of God. Extract from 
man the primary religious consciousness that links 
him to the Divine in the immediacy of fellowship 
and the rational proofs may prop up above the soil 
an imaginary religious twig, but they can never trans- 
from it into a vital organism that sends its roots 



2 2 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

downward into the subsoil of the soul and its branch- 
es upward toward God. But with the that of the di- 
vine existence firmly established in the primary con- 
sciousness of man, then reason as it awakens and 
developes expresses itself in more and more elabor- 
ate systems of rationality, not only as to the that but 
especially as to the what of the existence of God. 
Thus reason is not asked to do the impossible, but 
to do what it can, and in this realm its work is recog- 
nized to be indispensible. 

In the wake of a developing rationality man 
rises from the fear of the purely transcendent object 
symbolized in the fetich of savages to the love and 
worship of God the Father Almighty as revealed 
in the Christian religion. So from the lowest sav- 
agery up to the highest civilization man in his reli- 
gious consciousness recognizes the presence of some 
supernatural power. 

The late Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer 
with Darwin of the law of Evolution, sums up the 
work of his life in a great book which he calls, "The 
World of Life". The thought of this great scien- 
tist is that the whole Universe is out upon an upward 
march under the directive influence of an infinite 
Intelligence. The most wonderful chapter in the 
book is that on the u Mystery of the Cell". This 
little cell, the earliest form of life, with its central 
nucleus, suddenly moves and there is a mechanical 
movement, a chemical movement and a vital move- 
ment. "Under the microscope it seems perfectly 
clear that the cell is moving under a directive Power. 
So wonderful are the movements of the cell that one 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 23 

is smitten with awe and adoration as was Moses 
when he uncovered in the presence of the burning 
bush." 

Whence has this cell the power to embroider 
the hillsides with violets, the valley with corn and 
the mountains with pine and hemlock? Whence its 
power to build the birds of the air, the cattle upon 
a thousand hills, and the brains of a Socrates and 
an Aristotle? There is a power in the world, not 
itself, that makes one cell to become a thousand 
and two cells to become ten thousand, until plant and 
animal life rises rank above rank, class by class, 
family by family, till man stands forth under the 
stars, answering with song and prayer and worship 
the overtures of the infinite God! The essential 
conclusion drawn by Prof. Wallace from his study 
of the "World of Life" is the presence throughout 
the universe of "A Creative Power, a Directive 
Mind and an Ultimate Purpose". 

So also Mr. Herbert Spencer says, "There will 
remain one absolute certainty, that man is ever in the 
presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from 
which all things proceed." 

Fisk says that Spencer's Eternal Energy must 
be thought of as self-conscious, self active spirit. 
All experience certifies that spirit and not matter 
is creative. The mind cannot stop short of that. 
So he reminds us of Goethe's words put into the 
mouth of Faust when walking in the garden with 
Marguerite who asked him if he believes in God. 
Faust replies, in substance, so long as the tranquil 
dome of heaven is raised above our heads, and the 



24 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

blossom-set earth is spread forth beneath our feet, 
while the everlasting stars course in their mighty 
orbits, and the lover gazes with delight into the eyes 
of her who loves him, so long must our hearts go 
out to Him who made the heavens and the earth. 

Thus man's consciousness of the presence of 
the Divine appears to be a fundamental cognitive ele- 
ment in his religious experience in all stages of his 
development. 



II 

ANOTHER such element in man's religious ex- 
perience is his conscious spiritual disharmony 
in relation to the divine Being. 

Doubtless this sense of disharmony is much 
more pronounced in some types of religion than in 
others. The late Prof. William James separates 
religion into two great types: the religion of 

"healthy-mindedness" and the religion of "soul-sick- 

ii 
ness. 

The religion of the healthy-minded is optimistic. 
It responds to the appeal of the divine goodness. 
Its God is the impersonation of kindness and beauty. 
It reads His character, not in the disordered world 
of man, but in the romantic and harmonious world 
of nature. This is the religion of the one-story life, 
the once-born, the single-self. Such a soul has no ex- 
alted sense of divine holiness; therefore, no deep 
sense of sin in his own life or in that of the race. 
He does not deny evil absolutely, but minimizes it, 
and his atonement for sin is as mild as his conception 
of the disease. Such religion does not recognize a 
Redeemer so much as a Revealer of God and an 
Ideal. 

While this type of religion must be considered 
genuine, it must at the same time be considered 
superficial. It borders very close upon that irreligi- 
ous realm of self assertion which so exalts man that 
if he sees God at all he must look downwards. 



25 



2 6 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

But even healthy-mindedness, so long as it remains 
religious, recognizes, however slightly, its dishar- 
mony with the divine perfection. 

Over against this optimistic religious type 
stands that of the sick-soul. It is pessimistic. It res- 
ponds to the thought of the divine holiness and per- 
fection. "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold 
evil, and must not look upon iniquity". "Holy, 
Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is 
and is to come". "The very heavens are unclean 
in thy sight". 

This type of religion magnifies the f ragmentari- 
ness and failure of human life. The soul is sick. 
"The whole head is sick and the whole heart faint. 
From the sole of the feet even unto the head there 
is no soundness in it." There is need of a physician. 

In this religious type we find the most exalted 
conception of the divine holiness, the most profound 
conviction of sin and the deepest sense of the need 
of salvation. A terrible disease demands heroic 
treatment. Hence in the religious experience of 
sick-souls, divided-selves, are to be found the cases 
of sudden conversion. This is the religion of the 
twice born. 

The religious consciousness in both these types 
rests upon the idea of God as the absolutely perfect 
Being. In such a presence man necessarily becomes 
more or less aware of his own immaturity, weakness 
and sinfulness. The presence of perfection reveals 
imperfection. The line looks straight until the 
straight edge is placed against it. The angle looks 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 27 

perfect until the square is applied. The wall ap- 
pears true until the plumb line is hung. 

So John the Baptist in the presence of the 
Scribes and Pharisees could say, "Ye generation of 
vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to 
come?" But when he stood in the presence of the 
Master of men he saw himself in the presence of 
such perfection that he said, "I am not worthy to 
stoop down and unloose the latchet of thy shoes". 

Simon Peter disputed with other disciples as 
to his being the greatest man in the kingdom of his 
Lord. He had "left all" to follow Jesus and as a re- 
ward desired to be secretary of State in his 
earthly kingdom. To the Master he said, u Tho all 
others forsook thee, yet will not I". Peter had an ex- 
alted sense of his own self importance. But when in a 
great moment of revelation he caught a glimpse of 
the real character in whose presence he stood, he 
fell upon his facce at the Master's feet, crying, "De- 
part from me Lord, I am a sinful man". 

Isaiah was court-preacher to king Uzziah. 
One morning he found crepe upon the palace door, 
the guards moving softly about, and the whole king- 
dom in mourning. Death had entered the palace 
and laid his icy fingers on the king's wrist and said, 
"Come with me." The great monarch bowed his 
head and departed. In that hour Isaiah saw the 
weakness of human strength. But he saw some- 
thing else. "In the year that King Uzziah died I 
saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted 
up." King Uzziah is dead but the King of Kings 
lives and reigns. "Above him stood the seraphim.... 



28 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

and one cried unto another and said, "Holy, holy, 
holy, is Jehovah of hosts." In the light of that 
perfect holiness Isaiah saw himself and cried, u Woe 

is me! because I am a man of unclean lips 

for mine eyes have seen the king, Jehovah of 

hosts." Such a vision of God is always followed 
by an abasement of self. 

Job was remarkably conceited in behalf of his 
own personal righteousness. But when he caught 
the vision of the purity and perfection of God, 
seeing himself in the light of that vision, he cried, 
"I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but 
now mine eye seeth Thee ; wherefore I abhor myself 
and repent in dust and ashes." 

This religious consciousness, though in an un- 
developed form, is found in even the lowest races of 
mankind, and indeed is inseparable from the con- 
sciousness of self. Over against the divine ideal 
stands the human real. The conscious disharmony 
between what man's life is and what in his luminous 
moments he sees that it ought to be gives existence 
to humanity's universal sense of need, and conse- 
quent cry for salvation. Man has missed the 
mark, the true end of his life. Knowing the better 
he has willed the worse. Hence he has "sinned and 
come short of the glory of God." 

In many cases, in the higher stages of religious 
experience, this sense of guilt assumes the attitude 
of an overmastering assurance of God's condemna- 
tion. "Your sins have separated between you and 
vour God and vour iniquities have hid His face 
from you that He will not hear you." Adam was 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 29 

not so much an individual as a type when, having sin- 
ned, he slunk away to hide himself among the trees 
of the garden when he felt that God was drawing 
nigh. Goodness loves the light. Innocence fol- 
lows the sun. But guilt hies away into the dark- 
ness. 

When the child fears the parent either he is 
an unlovely parent or else the child is guilty. In the 
latter case the object of dread is not the loving parent 
but the creature of the child's own guilty imagina- 
tion. Guilt has separated the child from a true 
vision of the parent. When I detect God's glory 
in the world and trace His handiwork in field and 
flower; when I recognize His voice in conscience and 
feel the power of His love in my heart, there is 
"society where none intrudes." But sin's work is 
to separate from God, and if in the sea and sky, if 
in conscience and heart, if in the Cross of the Christ 
— if in all these, I see and hear no God, then sin's 
separations from God are in me complete. My eyes 
have been blinded and like another prodigal I am 
separated from my Father's house to feed my life 
on husks. 

In other cases when man's guilt involves social 
alliances his consciousness emphasizes his condition, 
not so much as a sinner against God but rather as 
an enemy of all nature and a social outcast. "Cur- 
sed art thou from the ground, which hath opened 
its mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy 

hand A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou 

be in the earth." Such was the guilty consciousness 
of the murderer Cain. The very ground curses him. 



30 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

Nature is against him. There is a power at the very 
heart of the universe that makes for righteousness. 
"From the heavens fought the stars, from their 
courses they fought against Sisera." All the forces 
of the universe are arrayed against him who lives 
unworthily. 

When Israel forsakes Jehovah and turns to 
idols. " "Carmel languishes and Lebanon mourns. " 
"The whole creation groans and languishes together 
in pain." Nature grows duller and poorer as we 
grow worse. We impress ourselves upon the uni- 
verse and read into nature the story of our hearts. 
When Lorenzo and Jessica make love every star 
in heaven sings like an angel. When Julius Caesar 
is about to be assassinated the night is full of wild 
alarm and portent. When Lear's agony reaches 
its climax and he is sightless and outcast and goaded 
to madness, nature is in agony and there are thunder- 
ings and lightenings and turmoil and uproar in the 
elements. Nature echoes the emotions of the human 
heart. Hence the guilty conscience casts a baleful 
shadow over the face of nature. 

Before Queen Guinevere came and sinned, the 
land was alive with spiritual presences. Their songs 
were heard and their lights were seen "far into the 
rich heart of the west." In every cavern dwelt 
some little elf making music like that of a distant 
horn. As the knight, pure and true, rode through 
the forest on his way to Camelot, "Himself beheld 
three spirits, mad with joy, come dashing down on 
a tall wayside flower." All nature pulsated with 
spiritual life. Then came Guinevere and sinned and 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 3 I 

fell. Now the light and the joy and the music are 
withdrawn. Beacons disappear, caves are deserted. 
The forests are cheerless and desolate. Such is the 
essential connection between nature and human na- 
ture. Tennyson, the poet-philosopher, sees that 
life is less abundant, and the forest less fragrant, 
and music less sweet, because of the discord intro- 
duced by the guilt of Guinevere. The great reinforc- 
ing powers of the spiritual world are excluded and 
exiled from nature and human life by wrong doing. 

But man's consciousness of guilt may lay great- 
est stress upon his separation from his fellowmen. 
"A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the 
earth. " The physically unclean and diseased were 
separated from the congregation of Israel. "All 
the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall 
be defiled, he is unclean, he shall dwell alone, with- 
out the camp shall his habitation be". But moral 
leprosy separates more unerringly between the clean 
and the unclean. "What communion hath Christ 
with Belial?" 

Men talk about "social vices". All vice is 
anti-social. It separates man from man. It drives 
Judas from the society of Jesus into the night. But 
does not Judas find in the darkness a comradeship 
that suits him better? He seems to do so for a 
little while. But soon he is seen standing on the 
cliff that overlooks the field of Aceldama. He is 
the picture of completed despair. Where now is his 
comradeship of darkness? Where now those friends 
of the night who bargained with him amid flattery 
and frolic to betray his ideal? That comradeship 



32 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

has perished already. Any friendship founded on 
crime is as unsubstantial and as unenduring as the 
ladder in Jacob's dream — it vanishes when the cat- 
nap ends. Sooner or later vice will grind society 
to dust. Secular historians like Gibbons trace the 
downfall of nations to the disintegrations wrought 
by sin. Thus Egypt perished, and Babylon decayed 
and Greece rotted at the heart, and Rome was guilty 
of spiritual suicide, and Spain lost the sense of rev- 
erence and forgot God and her glory departed. 
u Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." 
Hell is the harvest of an evil life. There is no 
chasm so deep and no barrier so high between man 
and man as that which is caused by sin. It separated 
Cain from Abel by the chasm of death. Then it 
separated Cain from the society of his fellows to be 
"a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth." Thus the 
record of sin from the beginning of the race is that 
of the sundering of the bonds of brotherhood be- 
tween man and man. 

This truth Coleridge developes dramatically in 
his "Ancient Mariner". The seas were calm and 
the voyage prosperous until the mariner slew with 
his cross-bow the innocent and beautiful Albatross. 
Thus he disturbs through wanton cruelty the har- 
mony of the universe. Sin enters his Eden, des- 
troying its beauty through the introduction of death. 
Now the mariner awakens to the consciousness that 
all nature is against him. 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 33 

"Down dropped the breeze, 
The sails dropped down; 



Day after day, day after day 
We stuck, nor breath, nor motion; 
As idle as a painted ship 
Upon a painted ocean. 

Water, water everywhere 
And all the boards did shrink, 
Water, water everywhere, 
Nor any drop to drink." 

But worse than the enmity of nature is the curse of 
his fellows. He had wrought their ruin; and "they 
leave him alone with the nightmare life and death 
of utter solitude". The lifeless bodies of his crew 
lay all about him. 

"The many men, so beautiful! 
And they all dead did lie: 
And a thousand, thousand slimy things 
Lived on; and so did I." 

The slain albatross, symbol of his sin, hangs about 
his neck. He tries to pray. His heart is as dry 
as dust. The prayer fails. The curse of his guilt 
is to be "alone on a wide, wide sea", separated from 
God and his fellows. 

Thus man's awaking consciousness soon dis- 
covers that there is something wrong within himself, 
and that his salvation hinges upon his making proper 
adjustments to the higher Power. Along with the 



34 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

wrong part man is aware of a better part within 
him, even though this is but a mere germ. In seek- 
ing deliverance from the wrong u he becomes con- 
scious that the higher part is conterminous and con- 
tinuous with a more of the same quality, which is op- 
erative in the universe outside of him and which he 
can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion, get 
on board of and save himself when all his lower being 
has gone to pieces in the wreck." Hence the uni- 
versal prevalence of altars and sacrifices, prayers 
and propitiations, by which man seeks to pass from 
a condition of wrongness into one of rightness in 
relation to the "more". In some lower forms of 
religion this end is sought through magic and witch- 
craft as well as propitiation. The attempt is even 
made to reduce the gods to servitude, as the genii of 
the Arabian Nights were subject to the possessor 
of some magic lamp or ring. But however this 
end is sought, man everywhere discovers at a very 
early stage of his social and religious development 
that there is in human life a disharmony called Sin, 
and that for the life it is a "pestilence that walketh 
in darkness and a destruction that wasteth at noon* 
day". 

The religious need of such a creature is not 
merely spiritual development and communion with 
God; he needs redemption and atonement and regen- 
eration and reconcilation. 



Ill 



HENCE another cognitive element emerges in 
man's higher religious experience, namely, the 
conviction that by the voluntary evil of his life the 
equilibrium of the spiritual universe has been dis- 
turbed and must be restored to avoid moral chaos. 
Sin is primarily an individual matter. There 
is a "true light that lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world." It does not light the same path of 
duty for all men. Abel must offer a bloody sacri- 
fice, Abram must migrate, Moses must legislate, 
Isaiah must prophesy, Paul must evangelize. But 
it does light some path of duty for every man. No 
life, savage or civilized, is without its gleam of light 
and truth. God has not left himself without a wit- 
ness in any human breast. Every rational being 
knows something that to him is truth and which 
if lived will make his life nobler and richer. An 
Apostle speaking of the basest men of his day, said 
"They hold the truth in unrighteousness." That 
is to say, they have something that to them is truth 
but they are not true to their truth, not loyal to 
their light. Some vision of some virtue floats be- 
fore every life. Some ideal beckons every heart 
to heights not yet attained. Religious duty requires 
of every life obedience to that "heavenly vision". 
Fidelity to the truth as one sees it is the divine 
standard for human life. The individual must walk 
in the light as he sees it, must live true to the truth 



35 



$6 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

as he knows it. When he falls below this divine 
ideal he misses his mark — he u sins and comes short 
of the glory of God". 

Such a man is what Prof. Royce calls the u ideal 
traitor". He has had an ideal which he loved with 
all his heart and soul and mind and strength but to 
which in some voluntary act of his life he has been 
deliberately false. His ideal is betrayed. His trea- 
son is commited. His false deed is done and can 
never be undone. The equilibrium of his moral 
world has been disturbed. Can it be restored? 

From this individualistic point of view the ques- 
tion of human redemption — involving atonement, 
regeneration, reconciliation and so forth — is gener- 
ally considered. What can redemption or salvation 
mean to the sinner in his individual relation to God? 

It cannot mean the annulment of his sin. That 
is forever impossible. 

It cannot mean any purely external service per- 
formed by God in behalf of the sinner. That is 
forever inadequate. 

It cannot mean mere escape from the penalty 
of sin. One man sentenced to prison as a penalty 
for crimes secures a pardon through political influ- 
ence, and escapes the penalty. Another man sen- 
tenced for a similar crime, serves his term but 
through the religious influence in the prison, comes 
out a "new man" — changed in heart to live a new 
life. One convict escapes the penalty but continues 
in sin; the other suffers the penalty but is redeemed 
from sin. Which man is saved? 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 37 

Salvation from sin means freedom from sin 
itself— from its power and practice. It involves 
repentance and regeneration, and without such a 
total change of heart the divine absolution from 
guilt is impossible in any case. 

But this change of heart does not destroy the 
guilt of the individual's past disloyalty to his light. 
No good deeds of his present or future can ever 
abolish that deed of disloyalty. His deliberate act 
of treason is part of himself. For that deed he can- 
not forgive himself. It introduces disharmony into 
his spiritual world and separates between him and 
his God. His need of salvation, therefore, is his 
need of atonement that shall somehow reconcile 
him to himself, to his past disloyalty to his light and 
to his God. All this is essentially involved in any 
adequate conception of individualistic atonement. 

The subject is the more complex if we suppose 
the individual's sin to have assumed a social aspect — 
becoming crime, involving his fellows in the conse- 
quences, severing human ties, destroying brotherly 
love, and wounding the community to its heart. 
Can any atonement restore the equilibrium to such 
a disturbed spiritual universe? Nothing short of 
this can ever satisfy the enlightened ethical sense 
of man, to say nothing of the perfect holiness of 
God. 

In his "Idylls of the King" Tennyson pictures 
Arthur beginning his reign with a noble ideal and a 
just and prosperous kingdom. All goes well until 
the queen falls a victim to her guilty love for Laun- 
celot. The result is "Red ruin and breaking up of 



38 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

laws". Arthurs ideal is shattered. His kingdom 
is rent by civil war and overrun by barbarians. The 
queen flees to a convent. There the king visits her 
before his last fateful battle of the West.When 
Guinevere hears the sound of his mailed feet along 
the halls she falls in deep repentance upon the 
floor. The king in noblest manhood and deepest 
love says, 

"Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
Forgives; do then for thine own soul the rest. 



I cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine. 
* * * 

I cannot take thy hand ; that too is flesh 

And in the flesh thou has sinned ; and mine own flesh 

Here looking down on thine polluted, cries 

*I loathe thee' ; yet not less, O Guinevere, 

For I was ever virgin save for thee, 

My love through flesh hath wrought into my life 

So far that my doom is, I love thee still. 

The king loves Guinevere. He forgives her in the 
sense in which Royce defines forgiveness — "An af- 
fectionate remission of penalty." Yet he cannot 
take her to his heart in one last embrace before 
his death, even tho' she is repentant and delivered 
from the power of sin. Why not? Because holy 
love cannot ignore moral consequences. "An af- 
fectionate remission of penalty" does not atone for 
the irrevocable crime and its attendant ills. 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 39 

"The forgiveness of sins" considered in its 
broad social and ethical bearings is thus seen to 
involve tremendous issues. Absolution from guilt 
is not the easy sentimental nod of the head or wink 
of the eye it is too often supposed to be. 

Dr. Leidham Green in his word on u The Steril- 
ization of the Hands" shows the extreme difficulty, 
yea, the utter impossibility of cleansing the hands 
of bacteria. Washing with hot water and soap — 
using sand or marble dust — does not avail. Turpen- 
tine, benzoline, alcoholic disinfection and various 
antiseptics equally fail to render the hands surgically 
clean. In fact the more the rubbing, the larger the 
swarm of bacteria aroused. This quest for physi- 
cal purity is a vivid metaphor of the impossibility 
of cleansing the hands from the stain of sin by any 
facile absolution. 

Pilate "took water and washed his hands before 
the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of 
this righteous man." But guilt will not thus easily 
wash off. 

Macbeth says, "Will all great Neptune's ocean 
wash his blood clean from my hands? No; this my 
hand will rather the mulutitudinous seas incarnadine, 
making the green one red." So Lady Mecbeth rises 
in her sleep and stands rubbing her hands, seeming 
thus to wash them for a quarter of an hour at a time. 

"Yet," says she, "here's a spot Here's the smell 

of the blood still : all the perfumes of Arabia will 
not sweeten this little hand." 

The forgiveness of sins" (used here as synon- 
ymous with salvation or reconciliation) must include 



40 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

not only the sinner's cure of his sin — his spiritual 
transformation, embracing repentance and regener- 
ation as we saw above: but must provide atonement 
to reconcile him to the memory of his sin and its 
consequence. Macbeth instinctively feels that his 
treason-crammed memory presents a tremendous 
obstacle to his peace. So he cries to his physician, 

"Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain, 
And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
Cleanse the stuffd bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart ?" 

Consider this question in the light of George 
Eliot's portrayal of Adam Bede. Bede, a strong, 
noble-minded carpenter, loves Hetty Sorrel, and pro- 
poses to make her his wife. Arthur Donnithorne, 
heir to the estate of Hayslope, conceives a passing 
fancy for Hetty and works her ruin. Hetty's suf- 
ferings, the birth of her child, her wanderings, her 
attempt to abandon the baby, her sentence to death 
for child-murder, are vividly portrayed. 

Arthur's remorse is intense when he hears of 
Hetty's plight. He sets himself to do what he can 
to repair the wrong and succeeds in having Hetty's 
sentence commuted to exile. 

Then Arthur and Adam meet. Adam's wrath 
is just and righteous. Adam has been deeply in- 
jured. Poor Hetty, his promised bride, has been 
cast body and soul into an unlighted abyss of woe. 
The equilibrium of the moral universe has been dis- 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 41 

turbed. Any facile absolution of Arthur's guilt, so 
far from being commendable, would throw the 
whole ethical order of the world into utter chaos. 
The very thought of such possibilty outrages the 
deepest instinct of the human soul. A gospel which 
tells the sinner how to escape from the rapids, where 
the victims of his sins are still struggling hopelessly, 
and promises him celestial joy with no smoking Sinai 
in his memory is a gospel of deception. But when 
Adam sees the marks of suffering in Arthur's face 
and learns of his determination to make every satis- 
faction within his power, even exiling himself from 
Hayslope rather than have Adam and his friends 
forsake the place, the heart of the carpenter is touch- 
ed, and he extends his hand in forgiveness. 

That forgiveness is the "affectionate remission 
of penalty". Without such unmistakable evidence 
of repentance, even such forgiveness would not have 
been possible. And though Adam gives his heart 
with his hand in forgiveness, yet he says to Arthur, 
"There's a sort of damage done, Sir, that cannot be 
made up for." No human efforts can atone for it. 
That is the havoc wrought in the lives and hopes of 
others. 

So in "Paradise Lost" Milton represents Adam 
as repenting when he sees his sin in the light of its 
destructive effects on his descendants. His sorrow 
is not so much for his personal loss as for the far- 
reaching misery entailed upon others. 

Man must have an atonement not merely for 
sin in himself, but for its memory and its conse- 
quences. Anything less than this is an incomplete 



42 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

reconciliation of man to his spiritual universe. Is 
such atonement possible? 

Prof. Royce says, "Could any possible new 
deed, done by, or on behalf of the community and 
done by some one who is not stained by the traitor's 
deed, introduce into this human world an element 
which as far as it went could be, in whatever mea- 
sure, genuinely reconciling?" 

His answer is that a triumph over treason can 
be accomplished on behalf of the community by some 
faithful and suffering servant of the community 
thus: "first, by a deed or various deeds for which 
only just this treason furnishes the opportunity; and 
secondly, the world as transformed by this creative 
deed, is better than It would have been had all else 
remained the same, but had that deed of treason not 
been done at all. That is, the new creative deed 
has made the new world better than it was before 
the blow of treason fell." 

Thus Milton's Adam must be assured not only 
of his own pardon, but "from his eyes the film is 
removed by three drops from the well of life instill- 
ed" and he beholds the unfolding grace of God in 
redemption until 

"He who comes thy Saviour, shall recure 
Not by destroying Satan, but his works 
In thee and in thy seed." 

In the rapturous vision of Christ's perfect vic- 
tory over sin in Paradise Regained, Adam descended 
"greatly in peace of thought". 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 43 

Christ on the Cross in a picture of divine love 
suffering for sin. But the vision of Christ on the 
cross must be supplemented by the furthur vision 
of Christ on the throne. Not only the suffering of 
love but the victory of love is essential to our sense 
of reconciliation. Evil must be overcome of good. 
The wounds caused by our sins must be healed. 
The scales of justice must be balanced. The equili- 
brium of the moral order must be restored. Antag- 
onistic forces must be reconciled in the complete 
triumph of the goodness of God. The discord in- 
troduced by treason into the music of the earth must 
become to our ear a great minor chord serving only 
to enrich the harmony of the universal oratorio. 

All this is involved in the reconciliation of the 
"traitor" to the spiritual universe. "No baseness 
or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter 
our human world but that loyal love shall be able 
in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason 
its fitting deed of atonement." Even so, in the poetry 
of the Millenium, "The wolf shall dwell with the 
lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, 
and the calf and the young lion and the fading to- 
gether; and a little child shall lead them — And the 
suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and 
the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's 
den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my 
holy mountain — for the earth shall be full of the 
knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." 

Out of what has been said above emerges logi- 
cally the last element we shall consider. 



IV 



RECONCILIATION to God— true articulation 
with one's spiritual universe — carries with it 
satisfaction to one's total concrete religious con- 
sciousness. 

The concrete religious consciousness represents 
more than the intellectual element in the conscious 
life of man. It includes the whole energy of man 
as a rational spirit. It is emotional as well as intel- 
lectual and ethical as well as emotional. 

There can be no religion without thought. 
Only as man conceives an object can he have any 
relation to it. Not to be related to some object 
recognized as divine is to have no religion. 

There can be no religion without emotion. 
Thought and feeling are inseparable. Man can 
have no feeling of dependence without a conception 
of something or someone on whom he depends. 

There can be no religion without conscience. 
Conscience is a combination of thought and feeling 
— of the knowledge of good from evil and the sense 
of obligation to choose the one and eschew the other. 

Thus religious faith involves the combined ac- 
tivity of thought, emotion, and conscience. Elim- 
inate thought and nothing remains but mechanical 
action. Remove emotion and thought arouses no 
response. Take away conscience and thought is not 
translated into life. The concrete religious con- 
sciousness, therefore, is a function of the entire man. 



44 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 45 

So long as any of the fundamental interests 
of man's nature are overlooked there can be no last- 
ing satisfaction for his religious consciousness. 
These fundamental interests are outlined and com- 
bined by Jesus in a single sentence. "If you know 
these things happy are ye if ye do them." "If ye 
know" — that is the head. "Happy are ye" — that is 
the heart, "If ye do them" — that is the hand, the 
will, the conscience. Head, Hand, Heart, know, 
do, enjoy. To the head the universe must be con- 
stitutionally rational. To the heart it must be be- 
nevolent. To the will it must insure the triumph of 
eternal goodness. 

Sometimes in the historic development of reli- 
gious faith the head gains a temporary ascendency. 
Religion then becomes intellectual and the great 
creeds are born. At other times the heart occupies 
the throne. Religion then becomes emotional and 
great revivals ensue. Again the hand holds the 
reins and religion runs out into great sacrifices and 
benevolences. When the intellect denies full re- 
ligious rights to the heart, it is soon compelled to 
do its work over again. When no sufficient place 
is left in religion for the intellect, it soon begins 
a crusade for recognition. While no theological sys- 
tem is secure whose conception of God the moral 
nature cannot approve. 

Thus religion always reflects the stage of men- 
tal and moral development attained by an individual 
or a community. The consciousness of God is 
bound up with man's very life and that consciousness 
he is compelled to express in some way even in his 



46 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

most childish stage. From the lips of Philipps 
Brooks, Hellen Keller received her first clear mes- 
sage concerning God. "O I knew all that", she said, 
"but I did not know what to call Him." He whom 
in her physical blindness, deafness, and dumbness 
she had worshipped in comparative ignorance, was 
then made known unto her as God the Father Al- 
mighty. 

The divine Being has been conceived in most 
different ways — as many and as one, as natural and 
as spiritual, as particular and as universal. In re- 
ligion as in other things, such as chemistry and as- 
tronomy and architecture and music and painting the 
primitive were the rudest and crudest forms. Yet 
rude and crude as they were they were the expres- 
sion of what was then highest and most rational in 
man reaching out towards what was highest and 
most rational in the universe. 

An English trader landed in Africa and tra- 
veled at great expense far into the country to buy 
cattle from 1 a native chief. The chief drove the cat- 
tle a hundred miles to meet the trader. Just when 
they met the chief discovered that he had forgotten 
his fetich. No plea of haste, no promise of reward, 
no threat to depart, nothing could induce the chief 
to bargain in stock without his fetich. So the Eng- 
lishman waited for days until the runner returned 
with the charm. Shall our Christian missionaries 
laugh to redicule the ignorant African's religion? 
No. His principle is right. He needs larger truth 
for his intellect and a worthier object for his devo- 
tion. When he gets that, when he leaves his ma- 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 47 

terial fetich and finds his spiritual God, the presence 
of the divine Spirit will be his charm and he will not 
trade cattle without God. 

The awakened spirit of man in its struggle 
from the lowest to the highest religious consciousness 
cannot remain satisfied with its ruder conceptions 
of the divine Being. The thought of God outgrows 
the possibility of being confined to any object what- 
ever; and man rises on stepping stones of his dead 
conceptions of God and His relations to the universe 
to higher conceptions, until he attains satisfaction 
to his concrete religious consciousness in its high- 
est development. 

The only Deity the religious faith of the twen- 
tieth century can accept is the one universal Spirit 
who is manifested at different levels in nature and 
humanity. Mr. Herbert Spencer says in his Ec- 
clesiastical Institutes, "The power manifest through- 
out the world distinguished as material is the same 
power which in ourselves wells up under the form of 
consciousness — This gives rather a spiritualistic 
than a materialistic interpretation to the universe. " 

How then is God's relation to the universe to 
be conceived? 

The Jewish religion emphasized the thought 
of God as entirely transcending the world. The 
stoic philosophy emphasized the immanence of God 
in the world and in human life. The Christian re- 
ligion in its symbolism of the "Trinity" combines 
in its conception of God's relation to the universe 
the ideas of His transcendence and His immanence. 



48 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

By the transcendence of God is meant that he 
exceeds, excels, transcends the universe. He is 
over all things, blessed forevermore. "In the be- 
ginning He created the heavens and the earth." 
"Before the mountains were brought forth or ever 
the earth and sea were formed, even from everlast- 
ing to everlasting Thou art God." 

The danger in the doctrine of the divine transcend- 
ence is that of isolating God from his world. So 
the deist represents God as creating the world and 
winding it up as a clock and going off to the peri- 
phery to watch it spin. The weights and springs 
and wheels and cogs and face and hands constitute 
the clock and determine its operations. In the uni- 
verse the laws of nature constitute the weights and 
springs and cogs and wheels. As there is no place 
in the operation of the clock for the clock maker, 
so there is no place in the course of nature for God. 
God becomes an Absentee from His world, exiled by 
His own creatures. Divine providence becomes an 
impossibility and prayer an absurdity. 

Under the power of deistic thought men speak 
of God as the source of all reality, yet attribute 
independent existence to all modes of being. They 
call God infinite, yet over against Him they set a sep- 
arate and finite world. As Spinoza says, "At one 
time they affirm the reality of the finite, and at 
another time the reality of the infinite, but rarely 
bring the two together and face the problem, how 
there can be a finite which is independent of the in- 
finite or an infinite which is independent of the finite." 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 49 

Such an opposition of independent existences ren- 
ders the conception of both essentially finite. 

In the recoil of thought from deism the rela- 
tion of God to the universe is defined by the term 
immanence. By the immanence of God is meant 
that he is not beyond the world but rather the all- 
pervasive soul of the world. He is in all things, 
blessed forever. 

When the universe was conceived as small it 
was easy to localize God in a dwelling place some- 
where beyond the limits. But to-day we can ima- 
gine nothing beyond the limits of the universe. To 
localize God beyond such limits has, therefore, be- 
come an impossible thought. 

If we are to think of God as anywhere we 
must think of Him as everywhere. Thus certain 
hilltop men, like the Psalmists, caught glimpses of 
the divine omnipresence in an age whose thought 
localized God in some distant heaven: 

"Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? 

If I ascend up into Heaven, Thou art there ; 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there; 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 

Even there shall Thy hand lead me, 

And Thy right hand shall hold me." 

Once men thought of God as separated from 
His world, governing it from without. But now it 
has become apparent to all students of the subject 
that the universe is operated from within. The 



50 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

forces that are found at work are resident forces, 
existing and acting within the system. If God is 
the operant force of the universe and it is operated 
from within, then He is within with His operative 
will and energy. So we no longer think of God 
as building up the universe as the engineer builds 
an engine, but rather as the engineer builds up his 
own body — a construction from within from the cen- 
tral germ of life in the tiniest cell of protoplasm to 
the full grown body with the pervasive and dominat- 
ing soul. Thus 

"Earth is crammed with heaven, 

And every common bush alive with God." 

God is not an Absentee. He is not the Great 
First Cause. He is not a celestial Mechanic who 
built the universe, equipped it with natural laws, 
hurled it out into motion in space and now and then 
interferes with its movements just to reveal His con- 
tinued oversight. God is the One Great Eternal 
Underlying Ground of all existence in Heaven and 
in earth. 

The great musician is as much the cause of 
the last note in the rendition of the symphony as he 
is of the first. The first note struck does not cause 
the second, nor the second the third. The soul of 
the musician is the underlying ground of the entire 
production. So He who in the first spring of creation 
caused the earth to bring forth "herbs bearing fruit 
after their kind," has been the cause of every a- 
wakening of life in creation since. If in the begin- 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 5 I 

ning He separated the "waters above the firmament 
from the waters below the firmament" every falling 
raindrop bears upon its face the evidence that the 
same separating Power still operates. If in the 
beginning He "formed man's body from the dust of 
the earth and breathed into him the breath of life 
till man became a living soul," bearing the image and 
likeness of God, even so has every babe since Adam 
owed its life to the same creative Power. 

"We are in the presence of an infinite and Eter- 
nal Energy from which all things proceed." 

"From Him and through Him and unto Him 
are all things." 

"He upholds all things by the word of His 
power." 

God is not only immanent in nature but also 
in human nature. Because he manifests Himself in 
the life of humanity, we see the human race develop- 
ing from its infantile beginning toward a future of 
unspeakable glory — to the "manifestations of the 
sons of God." "One thing history makes sure," 
says Matthew Arnold, "that there is a power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness." That 
power "works within man both to will and to do 
His good pleasure." The ultimate triumph of the 
good, therefore, is not assured of attainment regard- 
less of man's desire and cooperation. But the fact 
of man's spirituality and his inalienable divine in- 
heritance renders him forever incapable of perma- 
nent satisfaction with anything less than the univer- 
sal triumph of righteousness. 



52 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

So the Christian religion "recognizes that God 
is neither beyond the world nor simply the all-perva- 
sive soul of the world; but is essentially self-mani- 
festing, while remaining eternally self-identical in 
this self-manifestation." The fullness of God is 
not exhausted in His manifestations. He exceeds, 
excels, transcends them all. On the other hand He 
is not a Being separated from the world in which 
He is self-revealed, but the spirit operative in every 
part of the world. He is self-revealed in all that 
exists but most clearly and fully revealed in the 
self-conscious life of man. As we know more of the 
mind and heart of Tennyson through his "In Me- 
moriam" than through his construction of a kite, so 
we have a higher manifestation of God in the moral 
nature of man than in the material order of the 
world. We bear His "image and likeness." Hence 
we come to conceive of God as self-conscious Be- 
ing. "God is spirit." He is the Universal Spirit 
manifesting Himself on different levels in the na- 
tural law of the material world and in the moral 
law of the spiritual world. Thus the world and man 
are "Everywhere bound by gold chains about the 
feet of God." No device is needed to bring together 
God and His world. They have never been sep- 
arated. "What God hath joined together let no 
man put asunder." 

We have seen that the danger in the doctrine 
of the divine transcendence is that of isolating God 
from His world. On the other hand the danger in 
the doctrine of the divine immanence is that of 
identifying God with His word. As the one may 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 53 

be deceived into deism, so the other may be seduc- 
ed into pantheism. 

It is one thing to say that God is in the world; 
it is a very different thing to say that God is the 
world or the world is God. It is true that the 
highest life of man cannot be realized when sever- 
ed from the life of God, but it is not true that union 
with the life of God negates man's distinction from 
God or destroys his consciousness of himself. 

In our thought of the divine being and His re- 
lation to the universe we must preserve and com- 
bine the transcendence of deism and the im- 
manence of pantheism. This can only be done 
through the conception of God as the universal self- 
conscious Spirit who manifests Himself on different 
levels in the world and in man. He is the "Infi- 
nite and Eternal Energy" that thinks and feels and 
purposes and executes. He is the "power not our- 
selves that works for righteousness." 

"By Him were all things made." 
"By Him all things subsist." 

"We are also his offspring. He is not far from 
any one of us; in Him we live and move and have 
our being." 

And so we can 

"Speak to Him for He hears, 
And Spirit with spirit can meet; 
Closer is He than breathing, 
And nearer than hands or feet." 

Such a union with the living God satisfies not mere- 
ly the intellectual and ethical but also the emotional 
nature of man. 



54 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

Man needs God as a "Present Help in time 
of trouble." 

"Blessed is the n^an whose strength is in Thee: 
In whose heart are the highways of Zion." 

The birds hide themselves from the thunder clouds. 
When the light above the clouds begins to appear 
along their edges it calls out the birds again. What 
if there were no light above the cloud? Then the 
cloud of sorrow has no golden edge and there are 
no joyous birds to sing. But since "God reigns let 
the earth rejoice." 

Man needs God in the joy of life. In buoyant 
health you rise early some morning and go out to 
sniff the fragrance, see the beauty and hear the har- 
monies of nature. You are in jubilant spirits. 
Your heart overflows with gratitude. In such 
moments of joy your entire being cries out for the 
living God. Love demands expression. You need 
someone to thank for all this manifestation of good- 
ness. The completion of your happiness requires 
that you give thanks to the Giver of such gifts. 

Some time ago in a disaster in the Pennsyl- 
vania mines several men were buried alive. Res- 
cuers worked eighteen days and nights to open the 
subterranean prison before giving up all hope. 
Just when they were ready to throw down their tools 
in despair someone discovered what seemed to be 
foot prints. Could those men be alive still? They 
took up pick and spade and soon reached the open- 
ing where the men were imprisoned. A shout of 
joy ascended. The men were alive. The glad tid- 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 55 

ings were made known to the friends above. The 
news spread and the entire community, thrilled with 
gladness, gathered at the mine to welcome the lost 
back to life. Three thousand people stood waiting, 
all swayed by the same emotion. When the res- 
cued men were brought to the surface that vast 
crowd with one impulse began singing "Praise God 
from Whom all Blessings Flow." Professed in- 
fidels were there. Scoffers w T ere there. The non- 
religious were there. But in every heart was grat- 
itude and to express that emotion they needed a 
praise-hearing God and a Christian hymn! 

"Love to that w T hich is eternal and infinite, " 
says Spinoza, "Feeds the soul with unmingled joy, 
a joy untainted with any sorrow. This we ought to 
desire and seek after with all our powers." 

Only in union with God can the total concrete 
religious consciousness of man be satisfied. Such 
union is the open secret of life's conscious unity and 
peace and power. 

Men who find temporary satisfaction in sen- 
sible and social conditions are those w r ho live in 
such a healthy surface activity as prevents reflec- 
tion. They are children w T ho know neither the 
w r orld nor themselves. If once their spirit opens 
its eyes and catches but a gleam of light that streams 
through the rift in the clouds of its sensible firma- 
ment, they can never again be engrossed by the sen- 
suous. In his religious consciousness man becomes 
explicitly aware of w T hat he has always been impli- 
citly conscious, namely, that his true life is to be 
realized only in union with the Divine. This is the 



56 SOME COGNITIVE ELEMENTS 

thought of Augustine's classic utterance in the first 
book of his Confessions: — "Thou madest us for 
Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in 
Thee." 

Whoever thus walks with God feels at home 
in his Father's house though like Enoch he dwell in 
the forest primeval. 

Of such an one Job said "Thou shalt be in 
league with the stones of the field and the beasts 
of the field shall be at peace with thee." All the 
great reinforcing powers of the spiritual world are 
in league with him who is in league with God. 

Thus Browning pictures David with his harp 
arousing Saul from sinful despair. He lifts a soul 
into union with God. Now he sees a new face on 
all nature, gets a new view of life, observes the 
operation of a new law. Old things pass away and 
behold all things are made new. So David says: 

"I know not too well how I found my way home in the night. 
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, 
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive." 

David walks on air in the midst of the spiritual 
universe that is all about him. 

"E'en the serpent that slid away silent, — he felt the new 

Law. 
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the 

flowers ; 
The same worked in the heart of the cedar, and moved the 

vine bowers. 
And the little brooks witnessing, murmured persistent and 

low, 
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices, "E'en so! 

it is so." 



OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 57 

"All nations know that it is the religious con- 
sciousness in which they possess the truth; and they 
have therefore regarded their religion as that which 
gives dignity and peace to their lives. All that 
awakes doubt and perplexity, all sorrow and care, 
are limited interests of finitude we leave behind on 
the 'bark and shoal of time.' And, as on the sum- 
mit of a mountain, removed from all hard distinc- 
tion of detail, we calmly overlook the limitations of 
the landscape and the world, so by religion we are 
lifted above all the obstructions of finitude. In re- 
ligion, therefore, man beholds his own existence in 
a transfigured reflection, in which all the divisions, 
all the crude lights and shadows of the world, are 
softened into eternal peace under the beams of a 
spiritual sun. It is in this native land of the spirit 
that the waters of oblivion flow, from which it is 
given to Psyche to drink and forget all her sorrows; 
for here the darkness of life becomes a transparent 
dream-image, through which the light of eternity 
shines in upon us." — Hegel. 

Thus man's concrete rational satisfaction 
grows out of his true articulation with the Univer- 
sal Spirit. 

"As the marsh-hen builds in the watery sod, 

Behold, I will build me a nest in the greatness of God. 

I will fly in the greatness of God, as the marsh-hen flies, 

In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and 

the skies, 
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends into the watery 

sod, 
I will heartily lay me ahold of the greatness of God." 



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